Gary Younge is an author, broadcaster and award-winning columnist for The Guardian, based in Chicago. He also writes a monthly column, Beneath the Radar, for the Nation magazine and is the Alfred Knobler Fellow for The Nation Institute. He has written three books, "Who Are We - And Should it Matter in the 21st Century?", "Stranger in a Strange Land: Travels in the Disunited States" and "No Place Like Home: A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South". Gary has made several radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from the Tea Party to hip hop culture.

'Indeed, oftentimes, the emphasis on racial and ethnic differences is rivalled only by the negligible basis for those differences in biological fact. The outward difference of skin, eyes, lips, nose and other physical attributes are just that – outward. It is only thanks to the way race is constructed that these physical differences are transformed into racial characteristics. In 1998, the American Anthropological Association declared, ‘With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g. DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means there is greater genetic variation within “racial” groups than between them.’ In short, we really are more alike than we are unalike.

'If race is an arbitrary fiction, then ‘race-mixing’ is a conceptual absurdity. ‘In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions,’ the AAA continues. ‘Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.’ Put simply, to the extent to which ‘mixed race’ makes any sense at all, we are all mixed race.' [Read this chapter]